1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for processing multicast messages in a data processing system.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Some computer systems today are made up of many individual sub-systems, operating together to form a single data processing system. In such data processing systems, data communications among the sub-systems and with other data processing systems presents various challenges. Multicast messages, for example, transmitted from one source to many recipients are often challenging to efficiently process.